Albus Potter and the Perils of Values Dissonance
by AwfulLawful
Summary: Albus Potter begins his search for passion in the likely places. But for some, particularly Slytherins, the likely places hold nothing of value. What's the point of hunting if your prey won't provide a decent challenge? Will not be continued.


Albus wondered how six years had gone by so quickly. He supposed everything had fallen into a dreadfully boring routine. Despite the high level of drama his family had been going through what with his parent's divorce and all he hadn't been so much as unnerved by it. His Mum and Dad fought too much to begin with and he assumed, even at the age he'd been at the time, that it was for the best they separate before someone get hurt.

Still, one doesn't exactly walk away from revelations like that without thinking about their own romantic future in some ways, no matter their age.

Until he'd hit fourteen Albus had let time pass by. During his days at Hogwarts he'd spent his time with Rose and Scorpius when he could, attending class or wandering the castle unseen causing mischief with his brother and Teddy. When he was home he wrote his friends and spent time with his family, despite how many there were for him to divide his time amongst. Never let it be said that Weasleys weren't prolific.

After the divorce and subsequent pairing off with others his parents had done there hadn't been any big discoveries, adventures, or significant fights to catch his undivided attention. Life went on as normal. School let out for summer, summer ended and the next school year began, holiday seasons came and went and summer arrived again.

Rarely he would see Scorpius during the summer, since their dads were so close, but his pure blood friend was barely at home even then, dedicated to his studies to a level that made Albus's aunt Hermione adore him. Once Scorpius had discovered his talent for healing after an accident in their third year forced him to use Laying On Hands, the blonde had thrown his entire being into his new purpose in life. While Albus was proud of his friend and had no doubt he would succeed in his chosen career it was certainly annoying how little time it allowed them to spend together.

They had grown apart as they matured. Albus's romantic interest had faded as he realized that the young healer's training schedule would make any serious attempts at courting or even remaining close nearly impossible. After months of agonizing over it rather dramatically, he'd courteously bowed out of his planned seduction after they came of the proper age. Though not without a substantial amount of pouting over it in private. Albus even now sometimes _craved_ snarky blondes.

Normally Albus would have made tremendous efforts to accommodate this, but for someone he knew well. Scorpius had become an entirely different person since his discovery. His Dad and Uncle Ron had told him that saving someone's life changed you forever on a level one couldn't really explain or stop. Now he knew they were right.

It certainly wasn't a bad thing, but that drastic a change couldn't be ignored or written off. It would require the time and effort to learn who Scorpius was all over again from scratch after years of careful observation and effort had been essentially wiped clean. Though it pained him a little to admit it, Albus was nothing if not honest to himself; he was simply not that patient.

His mother had noticed.

The legal age for Wizards and Witches to marry was fifteen, though parental consent and prenuptial agreements were required up until seventeen. Most still waited until their twenties to be safe, but others, like Albus, just didn't have the staying power. Traditionally the women of the family did the watching over the aging children and keep tabs on their goings on romantically. Though the matriarchs of the Weasley and Potter families had done nothing more for James and Teddy than make sure they had easy access to contraceptives, Albus had been watched for the past year by every mother, sister, aunt and cousin as if he may spontaneously explode.

Pausing mid-bite to watch a Ravenclaw girl walk past the Slytherin table on her way out of the Great Hall, his eyes focused on the curve of her legs as if he were trailing a Snitch. Her hair was silken, raven and just long enough to stop at the curve of her backside as if to deliberately direct attention there. Her waist was high and would be well suited for older dresses meant to accentuate the breasts rather than a woman's curves, though she still had a few years of filling out to do yet. Fleetingly Albus saw Rose casting him a terribly sharp look from the Ravenclaw table meant to quell him - the girl was obviously spoken for.

He frowned and went back to his thoughts on the way his family had been keeping tabs on him. Though he was immensely annoyed about it, he couldn't deny one thing.

They were right.

Albus had been dating to be sure, but for entirely different reasons than his brother. It wasn't a competition or a quest to find something pretty to spend his free time with to entertain himself. He'd been learning personalities he liked, physical features he found attractive, morals he agreed with and discovering which opposing ones he could and could not tolerate. Sex was something he engaged in with as much respect as he could and prided himself on giving as well as he received, and lately he'd been giving better simply from more experience than his partners.

That was how he'd learned he liked the innocent ones, even though it was obvious they wouldn't stay that way once he'd gotten hold of them. Something about patiently guiding someone through their first tentative experiences in a way that he was sure they'd remember fondly gave him a sense of accomplishment. And gave him quite a sense of superiority over James, who seemed unsatisfied with anything less than rough, frantic lovemaking that seared with passion but lacked lengthy satisfaction or regard for the less practiced.

Generally he had a wide range of interests. There was no specific hair or eye color, weight or height range (within reason), or even blood purity he preferred enough to snub anyone genuinely interesting. Not that Albus was prejudiced at all, but blood purity was something he took into account by necessity. It was for selfish reasons he did, because a lot of the pure blood lines were traditionalists who would prefer to remain 'unspoiled', which he thought was an awful way to refer to it, until marriage. Some of them professed they would be examined by healers before the big day to make certain they were, and he knew for certain there were spells to sense if a hymen had been surgically repaired.

Albus didn't think he could accommodate that particular wish. He was nowhere near as reckless as James or Teddy, and polite enough to respect a family's beliefs- he WAS a Slytherin, after all - but sex was too big a part of his relationships to wait longer than a month or so after they began. Albus was too easily riled and loved to feel another body writhing against his own far too much to wait for any traditional courting period to pass. That mostly restricted him to other houses than his own. And if he hadn't managed to stealthily _acquire_ his father's map from his brother in second year (with Uncle George's help, of course) he'd never be able to entertain much at all.

Albus would have felt bad about that, but he had already informed his dad that James should have the Invisibility Cloak being the oldest in the line. Not for a moment had he regretted possessing the Marauder's Map afterward. Albus personally thought he resembled his Uncle George more closely than James did anyway, particularly because his own pranks lacked a sense of malice that James seemed to take to heart. The original marauders (aside from Teddy's dad, if the rumors were to be believed) probably would have thought Albus entirely too soft, especially for a Slytherin.

Taking a moment to think carefully as he surveyed the students around him, Albus listed the things he definitely knew he preferred in a partner.

Though there were very few physical traits he focused on aside from general attractiveness, long hair was one of his vices, and fair colors at that. Albus had once dated a Gryffindor girl with chestnut hair so long he could actually and in all literal senses of the phrase _tie her up in it_, so he'd developed quite a fixation on that. She'd been a lovely thing too- plump yet curved in all the right places and possessed of breasts that her skinnier peers could only hope for in their dreams. And, if he had to admit it, her glasses were adorable. He ought to add that to the list.

Albus was beginning to think of reasons to justify his appreciation of tasteful tattoos, not at all influenced by the prevalence of them among the Slytherin dorms, really, when his train of thought suddenly experienced a catastrophic crash. Fate, he thought as soon as he was able again, seemed to have decided to throw some of his father's inevitable strangeness into his life. Who'd have guessed that the instant he was beginning to seriously decide his standards on attractiveness when selecting a permanent lover he would encounter the absolute epitome of what he was certain was NOT attractive?

The new attendee that had walked into the Great Hall and sat at the Slytherin table must have been an exchange student. He was certainly too old to be a first year; fourteen, possibly fifteen. An older student wouldn't have been sorted with the first years to avoid embarrassing them. His sorting would have to take place after the ceremonial one, private and in the headmaster's office. Albus could see a slight line on the pale forehead that was familiar from a hatstall. The Sorting Hat would almost get frustrated with the child it couldn't place and grip harder as if that might physically squeeze out the thoughts it needed - something Albus had personal experience with. He wondered what the other house option was.

And where the young man had come from. Those expelled from other schools weren't often allowed into Hogwarts. This would only make sense if he was either from another country or his family had decided not to home school him this year. Perhaps a pure-blood, then. Slytherin might be a good choice in that case, despite the lack of fire in his eyes.

THAT was what had Albus wincing about the youth. There was now one thing that Albus was absolutely sure he wanted in a lover; presence. No matter how hard or long he stared, no matter the angle he tried to look from or the amount others tried to talk to the newcomer there was absolutely no mistaking it.

He looked positively _soulless_.

Albus knew that was rubbish, obviously. He knew what happened when a Dementor or any other such thing sucked out a human soul, and the treatment for it was the same that Muggles used for the brain-dead in most cases; leave them in a bed and wait for their body to shut down so you could bury them. It was seen as a mercy more than anything else, really. But in both cases the body left behind was inert. It didn't move on its own or react to stimuli, and certainly didn't actively ignore those trying to speak to it like this new student was doing now. The way he looked and regarded the world around him reminded Albus of something his Aunt Hermione told him about Momento Mori.

There were old stories she'd told them all on Halloween. An old Muggle tradition of postmortem portraits, flash-photography instead of the paintings they were all used to. The lot of them had all been confused about it since the pictures obviously wouldn't move and the people in them would still look dead. After being reminded that Muggle pictures didn't move, however, the reality of it had hit Albus like a gust of winter air.

Back then in the Muggle world photography was so expensive that few people could afford it, so it only made sense that one of the only pictures ever taken of a person would be the one your family was meant to remember them by. Only, people are made to recognize life in the eyes of those they're looking at on an instinctive level. Even in an old, fuzzy, colorless, motionless Muggle picture; the person in a Momento Mori would look disconcerting and inexplicably eerie. They would have no expression and strangely blank eyes and a stillness that even still photography couldn't quite justify.

One who was unfamiliar with the practice wouldn't be able to place why exactly the picture was so unsettling unless someone told them.

Watching the newest Slytherin now, Albus couldn't help but draw that association.

He certainly wasn't unattractive, really. In the right light he might even look alive. As it was in the light at the Slytherin table there was no color about him, though. Even his sunken dark-ringed eyes, that Albus assumed were supposed to be blue and were really larger than they should be for his age, instead managed a grey so blank he wondered if the young man were blind despite seeing the orbs move and focus on things around him. Maybe he was a seer, which would explain the incredible sense of depth to the gaze- it felt like the eyes were drawing Albus in, the centers tunnels so infinitely deep not even light could escape them while the vacant grey landscape just before gave off a false sense of still calm to trap those not wary enough to predict the influence of the bottomless pits within them.

His skin wasn't so much pale as it was white like bleached parchment and it looked equally thin and fragile as well. Letting his eyes wander further, Albus noted that the robes he wore were not only obvious pre-owned ones but ill-fitting as well. This body was far too thin for them and they hung off him enough to show more of his neck and less of his hands than usual - in fact the sleeves covered his hands completely. More than once he'd stopped trying to pull them back and simply grasped his fork and knife through them with invisible fingers. Perhaps he was older than Albus assumed and simply looked younger for wearing oversized robes. It was also quite possible the young man was simply underfed. It seemed like a distinct possibility since he was eating politely, yet ravenously of everything at the table he could reach.

The hair was what caught Albus's attention next. It was short and wild, but of the kind that would likely fall into neat waves once it got a bit longer. Like the deep pits of his eyes it was black and didn't shine in any light that touched it. Despite being short enough for consistently cut locks to be much of an issue it was so unevenly cut that it looked deliberate.

Overall, the youth was definitely unattractive to Albus. But, being the moral compass of Slytherin the moment the Sorting Hat had put him there, he had no choice but to go introduce himself. He rose and walked over, waiting patiently for the monochromatic student to pause in his dinner before smiling and extending his hand.

"Albus Potter. Welcome to Slytherin." When those eyes focused on him Albus's smile faltered only a bit. The sense of wrongness returned full-force and it only worsened when he only got a curt nod in response. "What's your name?"

The other simply glared at him without any real emotion.

"I've already tried, Albus. He doesn't talk. Poor bugger's probably mute." Allison Bullstrode said around her mug of pumpkin juice.

"I am not."

Albus winced. The voice was just as dead as the rest of him. "Why don't you tell me your name then?"

"And why didn't you talk to me!" Allison demanded irritably.

"Eadric Falconeri," he stated blandly to Albus, then he turned to Allison. "Your voice is annoying. I didn't want to encourage more of it."

There was a long, shocked pause before Albus started snickering helplessly. Unattractive or not, this bloke might turn out to be amusing at least.


End file.
